Making select contacts visible to only certain people

[tdeascentis]

In Hubspot, you can make some things private, like a template or sequence.  Does anyone know if there is a way to limit the visibility of a contact.  Making it private to select user(s)? 

[csymphony]

This would be a useful feature for us too. Particularly as we have the Hubspot email integration, there are some contact records where the logged email history should not be visible to all users. A simple "make this record private to [select the users who have access]" functionality, the same way you can restrict access to specific reports or dashboards, would be great! 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @tdeascentis,

Yes, this is possible. The concept is called Contact access in HubSpot and can be adjusted for each user in the settings. You can find the documentation for this here: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/settings/hubspot-user-permissions-guide#object-access

Summarized: For each user (or for a user role) you can decide whether they should be able to view, edit or communicate with (1) all contacts, (2) contact assigned to them only or (3) contacts assigned to themselves or a team member of theirs.

For example, marketing users from a certain regional team could have view, edit and communicate access to all contacts from their region. Sales reps however might only get to access contacts that they own.

In Enterprise subscriptions you can also define roles (for example a role for sales reps, a role marketers etc). That way, you don't have to set the contact access setting for each individual user. You can define a role (with certain levels of contact access) and assign that role to multiple users at once.

Best regards!

[jsalzberg]

One follow up question: if I want to provide a User only access to view contacts in which they are assigned a task so they are not the contact owner but they do have an assigned task associated with that contact is there a way to configure this? 

I see the ability to limit views to contact owners and a task view where they can see tasks that they "own" but they would need to see the underlying contact details for those tasks in order to complete them. 

[LeonardoDVinci]

Actually this does it for all contacts and users however I think its not feasible for all scenarios. What if you just want a selected group of contact and limit the access to specific users only? Is it possible to create a list that limits the users who have access to the contacts within the list, specifically creating an exclusive list?

[FScott]

Agreed, we are also looking for this solution. We want to be able to create a contact within Hubspot and assign them to be viewed only by the owner. So if for example I put a VIP into our database and they were only happy for their information to be viewed by myself and not the rest of the team, I could assign them to only be viewed by their contact owner which would be me.

[kvlschaefer]

Hi @FScott,

Thank you for feedback.

You can achieve this by going to your Account Settings  > Users & Teams > and clicking on the user. From there, under Object Access in the CRM Tab, there's an Owned Only option available to View, Edit, and Delete record as mentioned in this help article.

If you would like to have a list feature within user permissions, I would highly recommend you to please post this product suggestion at our ideas forum.

Our product team, who monitors the forum regularly, can read your specific use case and understand why this would be a useful functionality or change. 

Thank you,

Kristen

[FScott]

Hi Kristen,

That's not what I want to do - I have already contacted your support team who said that what we would like to do is not yet available. I, as a user would like to see everyone else's records and be able to edit them but ALSO have my own private contact records which only I can see, and nobody else (VIPs for example)

[LIsraelovitch]

We desperately need this feature too! I'm not even sure we can manage to continue with Hubspot without it. 

[karstenkoehler]

Hi @LeonardoDVinci,

---

@LeonardoDVinci wrote:

Actually this does it for all contacts and users however I think its not feasible for all scenarios.

---

That's correct and expected behavior.

It's currently not possible to base permission on list membership of contacts. All permissions are based on ownership (contact owner, company owner etc.), so this is how you'd define which records exactly a user could see: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/crm-setup/how-to-set-an-owner

Best regards!

[LeonardoDVinci]

Spoke with Hubspot Support and they offered me a beta feature called list partitioning. There is a part of that latest feature called content partitioning where you can assign grouped elements such as lists to users and teams.

I undestand the solution you are offering, however I think you misunderstand what we want to do. We like so set exclusive contact access among specific members. So let's say, I want to limit access to customer1's record to owner1 only. Ownership does assign it to a user however to stop other users from accessing that specific contact, we have to remove their access to other contacts with no owners as well. For our case, most of our contacts are ownerless at entry, and users just pick contacts from that pool. If we follow your suggestion, our process would collapse but thankfully soon we'll have that (content partitioning) feature.

[DanielleMoses]

Did you find that this beta version worked? This is exactly what our CEO asked me to do now so she has a private list of all our investors with only access granted to her. Wondering how I can do that...